All Together Now (Pentecost, Confirmation ,Senior Recognition; 1 Corinthians 12:1-13; May 15, 2016)

All Together Now

All Together Now

Pentecost  Confirmation  

Senior Recognition  

1 Corinthians 12:1-13  

May 15, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD  

First United Methodist Church  

Decorah, Iowa

This service came to be by the joining of two streams. The first arose from the planning for Confirmation. I wanted to have a relatively short but meaningful process to prepare for Confirmation and I wanted to celebrate this not-quite-a-sacrament on Pentecost. Pentecost began as the Jewish harvest festival that was observed fifty days after Passover. For Christians it marks the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, descending in dove-like flames or flaming doves and resting upon the Jesus followers who were cowering in Jerusalem and driving them into the world as Jesus’ witnesses. This, it seems to me, is a good time to confirm the promises of baptism made for our young people, to pray for the power of the Holy Spirit, and to send them into the world as Jesus’ ministers.

The other stream met up with this one by accident. Looking for a time to celebrate the academic journey (thus far) of our high school seniors, we proceeded by a process of elimination. Next Sunday was out of the question. That’s graduation day itself. No one would come. Last week might have made sense since we were thanking our Sunday School teachers then and that sort of connects with high school graduation. But we didn’t have the people available to get everything done, so we were left with today.

At the same time that we embrace some into the church in a new way we are sending some others off to schools, colleges, and universities in parts known and unknown. There is a time, says the preacher, to embrace and time to let go. We seem to be doing both at once.

But here we are, all together, to celebrate, to make merry in our subdued Iowa way. We celebrate the step of faith that five of our middle school students take today. We celebrate the step that our high school seniors take toward entry into the world of adult responsibility and freedom. We celebrate above all, the Holy Spirit, who in the absence of Jesus is the presence of Jesus among us, giving us the gifts and power we need to be Jesus’ people in the world.

What can I say to our confirmands, our graduates, and the rest of us who are unaware of taking any steps in particular this day? And do it in twelve minutes or less? I would like to tell the guests of honor, “Well done. Congratulations. Good luck.” To the graduates in particular we might add, “Write when you get work.” I’d like to leave it at that, but once again the Apostle Paul is here to spoil our fun.

We find ourselves once again in 1 Corinthians, the first or perhaps second letter of Paul to his problem church at Corinth. This time Paul is talking about spiritual gifts. These were abilities that were thought to be supernatural and some of them were pretty spectacular. People there were talking in languages neither they nor their hearers understood, while others could translate that speech. People were performing miracles and healings. There were people whose faith was so strong that they could move mountains, or at least molehills. People showed wisdom they didn’t have, knowledge of things they didn’t know. People were seeing God’s future in their present. We might explain or explain away each of these gifts, but let’s not.

The point is that each one seemed to have some gift. They were proud of these gifts. Each one seemed intent on making sure that they got the credit for it, too. They viewed their own gift as the most important of all. Worship must have been a little like America’s Got Talent. As a Jesuit priest I used to work with liked to say, “Behold these Christians how they shove one another.”

To be fair, they each wanted to be special. They wanted status in the new Christian community. They wanted to be as comfortable as their means could make them. They wanted to get something out of worship and their participation in church. They and we are not that different.

You confirmands have given up several Sunday early evenings. You have made an extra effort to be in church. You have taken leadership roles in worship. You have been required to read the Gospel of Mark, looking for what it has to say about being a follower of Jesus. (Quite a lot, it turns out.) Some of it has been fun. Some of it has been boring. Now you’re done. If past experience tells us anything, we can expect that some of you will stick around. Others will disappear until it’s time for your own senior recognition. Somehow some of you have gotten the idea that you are graduating from church. I’m pretty sure you didn’t just make it up. If you tell your parents, “I’m just not getting anything from church,” you can probably get out of coming altogether, if that’s what you want.

To parents and church leaders I’ll offer this: Our best bet for challenging the “graduation from church” syndrome, surprisingly enough, is most emphatically not a youth group. The biggest single predictor of youth participation in the life and ministries of the church is the enthusiastic participation of their parents. Parents, if you thought you’re job was finished, I’m here to tell you that you’re just coming to the hard part. The other thing that we can do is to involve our younger members in our mission and ministry as if they were full-fledged members, which in fact they will be in a few minutes. Every program of the church should have to answer the question, “How have you included young people?” If we are willing to love them without any other agenda, they will respond. This isn’t easy. Churches have hired youth ministers precisely to avoid having to do this work, but we can do it.

Otherwise, our young people will fill up their lives to overflowing. Their biggest challenge in the next few years will be getting enough sleep, not because they have no ambition, but because their ambitions have left them exhausted.

You graduating seniors really are graduating. You’re only taking a step, but it’s a pretty big one. Next fall some of you will be off to college or university. There, you’ll be free from your parents’ watchful eyes. The days in which colleges served in loco parentis are long gone. You don’t have to study. You don’t have to go to classes, especially those early morning ones. Of course, if you don’t study (about two hours outside of class for every hour inside class, making for about a forty-five hour week) and you don’t go to class I can guarantee you won’t like the results. And neither will Mom and Dad.

College or vocational training programs are your biggest chance to grow your native talent into real ability. You’ve probably figured out roughly what those talents might be in a general way. Funneling that into a college major may take a couple of tries, but you’ll figure that out.

You’ll discover quickly enough that your classmates will have a variety of motives for study. Some will be there to avoid having to get a job for a few years. Others will be trying to position themselves to make obscene amounts of money. Still others are looking for fame and recognition. And you will be free to do those things, too, if you choose.

Paul’s Corinth was every bit as ambitious and self-seeking as ours. In our passage Paul has two things to say to them.

First, he wants them to be clear about their allegiance. There were and are all sorts of things we can give ourselves to, obey, be formed by, or aspire to. People in Corinth, like people today, were fond of wealth. Some of them gave themselves to the pursuit of money. Others wanted power, so they involved themselves in the circles of power in their city or perhaps even in the empire. Still others wanted to enjoy themselves so they sought pleasure in all its forms.

Paul tells them that there is only one allegiance that counts, only one allegiance that is empowered by the Holy Spirit and that is the allegiance to Jesus. “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” This was and is a profoundly political thing to say. There was someone else who was proclaimed in this way. "Caesar is lord," they said. Paul countered, "No he isn't. Jesus is lord." Being a Jesus follower means putting allegiance to Jesus above everything else, every other claim, every other loyalty. It means putting allegiance to Jesus above allegiance to nation, to school, to team, to family, to social class, to race, to gender, to money, to pleasure, to power, even to our own lives if it should come to that.

The second thing that Paul wants them and us to be clear about is a "what for" question. We are who we are. We have abilities and gifts. We live in particular place and particular time. You who are graduating have a time ahead when it will be relatively easy to change some of that. You can develop new abilities and gifts. You can plan for life in a different place. Paul wants you to remember the "what for." What are your gifts and talents for? Paul tells the Corinthians that every gift that they have-- and they are understandably proud of them-- is for a purpose. It is for the common good.

I know that this is not a phrase that is very popular. We are individualists. We measure everything by how it affects us. We vote our own interests. We want to show a profit of benefits over costs from everything that we do. We come to church expecting to "get something" we can use to make our lives better.

So a demand that we seek "the common good" sounds very strange. But, contrary to David Copperfield's expectation, we are not the heroes our own stories. We are characters in a story about God and God's dream for the whole of creation and all who live in it. The common good is what that dream looks like when it comes even a little bit true. As strange as that sounds, a lot of us will have to seek the common good if our world is going to continue to be a host to our species.

So, I'd like to say, "Well done! Congratulations! Good luck!" to graduates and confirmands (and their parents) alike. But now I see that I have to amend that to say, "Well done! Congratulations! Go seek the common good under the direction of Jesus!"

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Community (6th Sunday of Easter; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; May 1, 2016)

Community

6^th Sunday of Easter
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
May 1, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

When I work with couples to plan a wedding, I give them a list of scripture passages to use as a menu, but the texts that actually deal with marriage aren't on it. That’s because the Bible says very little about marriage and what it does say is spectacularly unhelpful. So, the list contains other references and this reading is one of them. In fact, it’s probably the most often chosen.

This is in spite of the fact that marriage is not Paul's subject here. Paul's subject is community and the values and attitudes it takes to make one. Of course, the smallest possible community is two people so maybe what Paul has to say about larger communities could work for a couple.

Paul, of course, is writing to the church at Corinth. The Corinthian church was his problem child. We heard last week that they were divided into factions by their conflicts. When parties start to form we know that conflict has gotten pretty bad. Based on the preachers that each of the parties favored, I think it would be fair to say that the members of the church had a variety of backgrounds. Further evidence for this comes in the place where Paul takes them to task for their practices around their shared meals. There are rich people in the congregation and poor people. The rich people were bringing their own rich food to supplement or replace the simple meal of plain food that everyone else was eating. While everyone else was having tuna casserole and Jello with fruit salad, they were dining on langostino bisque and steamed peacock tongues in a red wine reduction.

Church had become a place to show off, a place to celebrate and underscore their status in the community. (Thank God nothing like that has ever happened in Decorah!) They even jockeyed for position in their ministries. Some of them had special talents that were thought to be gifts from Holy Spirit. They bragged about their gifts and the more bizarre the gifts the more they bragged.

From Paul's point of view the problem was that they had failed to grasp the values and the attitudes necessary to form genuine community. The culture around them was no help. It knew nothing about community that wasn't based on hierarchies of wealth and status. Ancient Greco-Roman society seethed with the constant struggle to achieve honor and status. There was only a certain amount of honor. One person could only gain honor at the expense of someone else. And that someone else was also trying to gain honor. Life in the ancient city was a constant and often vicious struggle.

It's no wonder they had a hard time leaving that at the door of the church. It's no wonder they had a hard time embracing an entirely different way of being in community, one that was not based on competition and struggle for status, but based on the love for each other that was due to them because all are created in God's image. It's not that easy to step out of one story and into another. Old habits die hard and they died the hardest in Corinth.

Of course, we know a similar struggle. Our culture tells us that we are individuals whose happiness lies in meeting our own needs and desires. If we can get what we want, we'll be happy. The things that we want are in the hands of other individuals and so we try to figure out how to get those things from them. They, of course, are doing the same thing. Now, if we are lucky we have more than enough of some stuff and we can trade it for what they have and we'll both be happy. In fact I may even make more of the stuff I don't need so I can get more of the stuff someone else doesn't need but I want. The ideologues of our culture tell us that we can achieve the general happiness and well-being of all if only we are each free to be selfish. They preach a kind of alchemy in which the lead of our basest desires that treats the whole world and every other person as the means to my happiness is somehow transmuted into the gold of general prosperity and happiness.

I can't deny that this culture is rich. It flashes a lot of cash. There is an extraordinary amount of wealth on display all around us. It comes at the cost—as we are discovering—of an overheated, depleted and poisoned planet. It comes at the cost of the human misery that wealthy nations export to poor nations. It comes at the cost of our own humanity as we discipline ourselves to ignore those costs.

One thing this culture cannot produce is community of the sort that Paul puts forward as God's dream for us. Community is not something that can be had by using other people or even the earth to meet our wants and wishes.

Some eighty years ago another Jewish teacher named Martin Buber explored some of these same issues. In his famous book I and Thou¹ he said that individuals do not exist outside of a relationship. The “I”, the self, exists only in relationship. That relationship can be with a thing, an "it", in which case the "I" can have "it". Or that relationship can be with a another subject, a "Thou", in which case there is no possession, only relation. The "I" that arises out of an I-It relationship is different from the I that arises out of an I-Thou relationship. The I of an I-Thou relation is fully human, but the I of an I-It relation can never be fully human. It is only a fragment, a distortion, of the fully human.

This is dense language and hard to grasp. Maybe, at the risk of over-simplifying, I can say it this way: when we relate to something or someone as if they were a thing we become users, possessors, owners, exploiters, that is, less than human. When we relate to something or someone as a person, we give up owning and live in relation as human.

When put in this way, it's impossible for me not to conclude that the culture that we live in, the world in which we work, buy, and sell, the world of schools and jobs and the internet, teaches us and even disciplines us to live as I-It I's. In that world we are reduced to owners and renters, buyers and sellers, superiors and subordinates, producers and consumers, and winners and losers. We give up ourselves, our true selves, for a shot at having the experiences and things that we believe will make us happy.

That is the myth of consumer capitalism. But that myth is a lie and it doesn't work. In all my life I have never met anyone who gave themselves to the world of objects to be possessed who was happy. We hope and maybe believe that we will not let this world become our whole reality. We want for there to be some area of our life that isn't run by those rules. We want our marriages, families and friendships to be exempt, to be spaces where we live in I-Thou relations.

But our culture's myth is a powerful one and it invades and colonizes every physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual place that is not firmly defended. We don't want to treat our children as things, but we spend our time making sure that they have the right experiences, cheering them on so that they will be winners and not losers. How many parents in the stands are living vicariously through their children, pushing them to be as strong and successful as they weren't. In preparing our children to be winners in a consumer capitalist world, have we made it harder for them to relate to people and things as anything other than means to an end? While pushing them to become functioning adults, have we made it harder for them to become human?

Paul, our first Jewish teacher, had an innate grasp of this. He understood that the church, the ekklêsia, as he called it, the assembly of God's people that was the Christian alternative to the citizen assemblies of the ancient city, had an alternate set of values and attitudes. Paul understood that the ethic of the I-Thou relation is love.

For Paul the choice was stark. It was the difference between night and day, between death and resurrection, between damnation and salvation. No wonder his prose reaches its highest expression in this chapter. His subject is worth everything he can bring to it.

Of course, this isn't a choice that most of us are able to make once and for all. We find ourselves with a foot in two different worlds. But we can remember which way the universe is moving. We can remember that God's final word is love not ownership. We can practice loving each other. I know it's not always easy. At least I know that I'm not easy to love. But churches are places where we can learn to love people we might not have chosen had the choice been left entirely up to us. In the midst of a world powered by the I-It relation, we can choose to say "Thou" to each other and to our world. Instead of trying to own each other and the world, we can come into relationship and in this way begin to become human.

We can check that tendency to view each other as sources of the things we want. Our spouses are not those who bring home a paycheck or make sure that we have clean shirts. Our children are not here to give us a sense of our own accomplishment. Our parents do not exist to give us spending money and pay for our unlimited texting. Our friends are not here to relieve our boredom or to be sources in an economy of exchanged favors. Our neighbors are not our competitors for limited goods. Our planet is not a neutral chunk of stuff for us to use and abuse in any way we please.

Instead we are called to love, not use, our lovers, our children and parents, our friends and neighbors, our world and all the creatures that share it with us. This sounds like a dream, a pretty bit of poetry. To be sure, it is poetry, it is a dream. But it is God’s dream. A world that is populated by I-Thou I’s, a world that lives by the love ethic seems fragile, but it is in fact the world that is coming into being all around us. It is the new world. The death-dealing dehumanizing world of self-serving and self-seeking is reaping what it has sowed. It is dying and will pass away. Consumer capitalism and any system that might pick up where it leaves off, is doomed. What will survive is community. Those who choose to serve each other are not the losers. The will no longer be doomed to see themselves reflected in the people and things they own or control. Instead they will live fact-to-face with those who know and are known by them. Whatever is lost, whatever crumbles, whatever is destroyed, love will remain for ever.

1 Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Martin Kaufmann. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1970.